Teen's shooting at border under review

Published 4:15 pm, Wednesday, June 9, 2010

WASHINGTON ? A multiagency U.S. investigation into the shooting death of a Mexican teen by a Border Patrol agent in El Paso centered on surveillance cameras Wednesday as tension between the two nations simmered.

U.S. authorities were trying to determine if the agent was justified in firing his pistol at rock-throwing assailants, while the Mexican government continued its protest over what it called a disproportionate use of force.

The FBI is poring over videotape from border surveillance cameras to determine what occurred Monday along the banks of the Rio Grande.

?There are a lot of cameras along the border,? said Andrea Simmons, an FBI spokeswoman in El Paso. ?We are reviewing video from the cameras that are in that area.?

The Border Patrol agents, who were part of a bicycle patrol, were investigating illegal border crossings near a railroad bridge west of downtown when they reported being pelted with rocks, the Associated Press reported.

Shortly after Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereka was shot, Mexican soldiers arrived at the scene and pointed their guns at the Border Patrol agents across the river while bystanders screamed insults and hurled rocks and firecrackers, the AP said.

?It pretty quickly got very intense over on the Mexican side,? Simmons said.

The agents were forced to withdraw, and FBI agents showed up later to resume the investigation, even as Mexican authorities pointed guns at them, Simmons said.

Mexican law enforcement, meanwhile, has raised questions into the shooting.

The death comes just two weeks after Mexican migrant Anastasio Hernandez, 42, was killed in California when a CBP agent used a stun gun to subdue him during a fight with agents at the border.

Mexican President Felipe Calder?n has called for a thorough investigation into the El Paso shooting and protested what he said was an increased tendency by U.S. law enforcement to use disproportionate force against Mexican citizens generally.

?The growing frequency of these kinds of events reflects a worrying increase in the excessive use of force on the part of some officials in the border region,? Mexico's foreign ministry said in a statement.

It claimed five Mexicans were wounded or killed by U.S. officials on the border in 2008, a dozen last year and 17 so far this year.

The statement said lethal force should be used only when ?an immediate risk to life exists, not as a deterrent measure.?

Some Mexican news commentators said their government wasn't doing enough.

?They don't think of any other reaction except sending the same useless protest note,? border scholar Jorge Bustamente wrote in a column that appeared at the top of the newspaper Reforma's opinion page Wednesday. ?There should be a limit to our inability to become indignant at such brutal actions.?

The U.S. State Department has been in detailed conversations about the shooting with Mexican officials.

?We understand the concern that they have about not just this incident but multiple incidents where we've had tragic loss of life at the border,? said P.J. Crowley, a department spokesman.

?We regret that loss of life,? Crowley added. ?We will actively investigate this most recent incident.?

?I would support an investigation to find out exactly what went wrong,? said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. ?But what it demonstrates is that our border remains a point of conflict.?

Cornyn said U.S. law enforcement remains undermanned and underfunded at the border.

He said Congress needs to consider ?what we need to do to get it under control rather than have it be in some level of chaos.?

Rep. Sylvestre Reyes, D-El Paso, a former Border Patrol sector chief, said he'd defer to ?the professionals at the FBI, and other agencies, to conduct a thorough investigation to ascertain all the facts.?

During his Border Patrol service, Reyes said, he was a victim of ?rocking,? the term used for assaults by teens and young adults who throw rocks at agents.

?When I was sector chief, I had a rock on my desk the size of a baseball that broke through a patrol-vehicle windshield and injured one of my agents,? he said via e-mail. ?Rocking can endanger an agent's life and they often have to make the best judgment possible in a split second, and under very dangerous circumstances, whether to use deadly force.?